An Alabama Moment - D. Winston Brown

In Alabama, even the rainy
summer days radiate.  I remember
the heat.  I had on red swimming
trunks, no shirt, and a whistle
hung from round my neck. 
There were children in the pool.
This sliver of detail I still find in
dreams, this ordinary day my
father had a heart attack.
 
When he talks my father talks
in stories, one building to another.
He remembers street names, where
houses used to be, where people
used to live.  When Arthur Shores’
house was bombed on Dynamite
Hill, my father, home from college,
was thrown by the blast from his
living room window sill.  When black
veterans returned to Parker High
School from the war, my grandfather,
the football coach, once threw a boy
with war-cold eyes into a locker because
he needed reminding that seeing the dead
had not made him a man.  As a practicing
attorney, my father saw a letter where a
white businessman lamented
the neighborhood’s “going black.”
 
My father, a man who knows jazz is a
gift from God, just like the stories of
Aunt Lulu’s store in Anniston, Alabama,
and knows that the creation of me lied in
the telling of these stories, would be proud
to know I’m still fashioning myself from
the fragment she passed along, that I am each
day improvising another piece of myself.
 
 
Still, I forget more than I remember, grow
weary some days of the pain.  Then I hear
the house filled with Miles or Coltrane,
Sarah or Betty and I recall that a legacy
is never a burden, only a gift.
 
 
My father had his heart attack
on a hot day while I sat by                                                        
a clear blue pool of splashing
children whose stories began
with a yell and ended most
often with a bullet.
 
So much is lost on
hot, August Alabama days
And      so        
                                  much   
                         is
                                                        gained.